


Mine Is the Sunlight

by elizajane



Category: Carry On - Rainbow Rowell
Genre: Breakfast, Cuddling & Snuggling, M/M, Morning After, Morning Sex, POV Baz, POV Simon, Prompt Fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-03-22
Updated: 2016-03-26
Packaged: 2018-05-28 07:32:09
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 5,521
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6320188
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/elizajane/pseuds/elizajane
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The one where Baz and Simon have sex the morning after the leavers ball.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you to [Knitbelove](http://archiveofourown.org/users/ladymac111/pseuds/knitbelove) and [Crowgirl](http://archiveofourown.org/users/crowgirl) for the beta!
> 
> Written, very belatedly, for the February 2016 #TwelveInTwelve2016 prompt "[second chances](http://twelve-in-twelve-2016.tumblr.com/post/138417115701/february-prompt)."

**SIMON**

Because we’re so close to the summer solstice, when I wake up the morning after the leaver’s ball, the first slanting rays of sunlight are already coming in through the East-facing windows of Mummer’s Tower. It’s just half five and I’m wide awake because I’ve been getting up for the early morning shift at Waitrose the past few weeks. Even on my off days, now, it’s hard to sleep in.

I’m also awake because Baz has rolled onto his back in his sleep, pinning my arm and my left wing at a painful angle underneath his shoulders. He’s sprawled half on top of me, wheezing gently the way he does when he’s slightly congested.

“Hey,” I say, hearing my own voice slightly gravelly from sleep, shoving at his shoulder, “Baz, I need you to--” and with grumpy sleep noises, he rolls back onto his side -- pulling most of the not-really-large-enough duvet with him.

Now my arse is getting cold.

I sigh and lean up on one elbow, experimentally, to see how much circulation Baz managed to cut off in my limbs. The answer seems to be “not much,” and I’m able to pull my wingtip back from underneath his pillow and fold it in against my back again without too much trouble.

Baz, buried now beneath the duvet, is showing no signs of waking up. And I’m awake enough myself now to appreciate what a victory this is -- that Baz actually trusts himself (or at least the Anathema) enough to let down his guard and sleep with me in the bed beside him. He’s tried to hide from me the fact he wasn’t sleeping, at Easter and on other weekend visits, but I’m more observant than he gives me credit for. I’d noticed the dark circles under his eyes and the catnaps he’d steal mid-afternoon while I was making dinner or watching a television show or helping one of the Bunces with something that needed a second pair of hands.

I feel like I probably had nightmares (I always do) but if I did I don’t remember them in any detail. Having Baz with me doesn’t make the nightmares stop, or even make them less nightmareish. But at least when I wake up from a dream where I’m chasing him and the Mage through the catacombs, or a dream where Baz has decided he wants to kill me after all, I can just roll over and there he is: safe and scary and _mine_.

It’s probably not what the Mage expected, when the Crucible paired us. I’ve wondered, sometimes, since December, what the Mage would have thought about Baz and me. It’s a weird thing to think about. The Mage and I never really talked about … that sort of thing.

My stomach growls and I realize I’m hungry. I roll into a sitting position and drop my feet to the floor. I rummage in my discarded clothes from the night before for my phone and then shuffle over to Baz’s desk for a piece of shortbread while I thumb in the code to unlock my screen.

It’s 5:57 now, and there will be food down in the dining hall in another half hour, a breakfast buffet like there always is on the last few days of term, when the graduates are packing up and the students from the lower forms are slowly trickling away by train or bus or in the family car.

I go into the toilet for a piss, and to brush the sour sleep taste out of my mouth. I borrow Baz’s toothbrush and hope he doesn’t mind; I forgot to pack one in my overnight bag. 

Baz hasn’t stirred when I go back into the main room, so I try to be quiet as I pull on pants and the jeans, tee shirt, and hoodie I’d crammed into my messenger bag.

In January, Martin had figured out how to modify some of my clothes so I could wear them without spelling my wings or tail insubstantial; sometimes it’s nice to be able to bum around the Bunces on my days off without being magicked. Penny had been as surprised as I was that her dad was so clever with the sewing machine, but in the end I had tee shirts, hoodies, and several pairs of jeans with tail and wing holes tidily added.

I grab the last shortbread biscuit when I’m dressed and my phone, then slide my bare feet into my trainers and slip out the door and down the four-and-a-half flights of stairs to the front door. It’s quiet on the grounds, and the grass is wet with dew. I wander down the gravel path to the courtyard just as a bus is pulling away through the gates, half a dozen people scattered in the back seats. I realize it must be the new Watford shuttle that Penny told me about, on our drive up from London yesterday, the one Mitali had had purchased to run students back and forth to the nearest rail and coach station at the beginning and end of school sessions, and on Fridays and Sundays during term.

I realize it’s quite comforting, actually, to see all of the small ways that Watford has changed already. For years, I’d looked forward to coming back to Watford every autumn for all of the ways I hoped it _hadn’t_ changed. It loosens something in my chest to realize that Watford is changing and I don’t actually have to hold desperately onto the way it was, before, in order to have friends, stay alive, be loved.

I cross the courtyard and walk between the chapel and the tower toward the stables, where I know they’ve planted a thornapple tree in memory of Ebb.It’s there, a scrawny seedling surrounded by still-dark earth and secured with wires and stakes, behind a circle of fencing to keep keep the first-years from trampling it during a game of ultimate frisbee. 

“Hey, Ebb,” I say. And then I’m not sure what else to say. So I sit down in the wet grass and let myself cry, for a bit, because I’ve been trying to be okay about that and because I remember how Ebb used to cry, and never seemed ashamed about it. So it seems like an okay thing to do, to cry and think about how much I miss her.

I hope someone is taking care of the goats.

When I’m done crying, I pull my phone out of my pocket and snap a picture of the tree for Penny, because I know she wanted to see it even though she wasn’t ready to come back to Watford yet.

I text it to her.

 _06:13: sitting with Ebb this morning  
_ _06:13: weird to be here without you_

And then, because I’m ready to think about something happier -- and because I know she’ll be happy for me -- I add:

 _06:17: also I did some research for you last night_  
_06:17: it turns out vampire-human sex IS possible_  
_06:18: and really brilliant :-D  
_ _06:18: at least with Baz_

She must still be asleep because she doesn’t respond immediately. Which doesn’t surprise me because Penny normally isn’t up before I leave at 6:40 for my 7:00 shift.

It’s still too early to go looking for breakfast at the dining hall, so I open my email and read the message from Rayshauna that’s the only new mail. (Rayshauna is the only person who really emails me anyway; Penny, Baz, and I mostly text.)

_Dear Simon,_

_I am writing to let you know that I had a very useful conversation with a colleague of mine, Orn in Grindavik (Iceland), who has done some ethnographic work with an isolated community in northwestern Iceland where mages, humans, and vampires have coexisted for several centuries. It is one of several such pockets of peaceful coexistence that are known to the Western magickal community, but which have been able to avoid persecution primarily by not being of any strategic use or threat to the powerful magickal families._

_Orn has some online resources that might be useful to you and Baz, and has also offered to work with Baz -- he is a licensed therapist as well as a sociocultural anthropologist._

_Let’s talk about this on Thursday - and in the meantime, I hope you will pass this news on to Baz. I think perhaps it would be appropriate to schedule a meeting for the three of us, so I can tell you both what Orn told me?_

_Be well,  
_ _Rayshauna_

I thumb the email back to the top and re-read it through a second time, although I don’t really have to. The last time we’d talked, Rayshauna had asked my permission to email some sort of group of magickal psychologists, sociologists, and other researchers who might be able to help Baz and me.

After last night it all feels a little silly, how worried we were, Baz was, how determined Penny was to fix our worry with research (because with Penny everything always starts and ends with research). But I know Baz still has questions. I probably do too. I just can’t think what any of them are, right now, sitting next to Ebb’s tree in the bright morning sunshine and feeling the seam on the inside of my jeans rubbing against the bruise where Baz’s fangs left their mark.

It hits me, then, that I’m not a virgin any longer. I mean, probably not -- right? Does it count if your boyfriend _almost_ gives you a blow job? If you come all over his fingers? If he ends up retching in the toilet but you fall asleep cuddled up next to him, with his hair tickling your nose? Somewhere between the first time I kissed him and last night, I’ve definitely -- _we’ve_ definitely -- crossed that line.  It’s just hard to know exactly when.

But as of this morning, I’m pretty sure the carnivorous unicorns that occasionally pass through the Wavering Wood wouldn’t count me virgin enough, any more, to make a tasty midnight snack.

I shift on the wet grass so that my jeans pull against the bruise, again, and think about Baz nosing into the curls between my thighs, think about his cheek pressed against me, _there_ , and his hand where no one else’s hand had ever been.

I blink back down at Rayshauna’s email: … _have been able to avoid persecution primarily by not being of any strategic use or threat to the powerful magickal families ..._

It’s not like I didn’t know racial prejudice and everything existed, but sometimes it just makes me feel so stupid and ashamed that, like, I never questioned vampires were evil all those years I was living with Baz and falling in love with him. It’s so mad to think that, for centuries, there have been people -- humans and vampires -- living together and maybe, probably, doing things like what Baz and I did last night. And just because the people in power hated them, the vampires and the humans who loved them, they had to go into hiding.

It also makes me really angry, when I think about it for too long, that Baz’s family never tried to find him people who could _help_ him. I know they thought they were trying to help, keeping it a secret and pretending Baz was just a normal mage, that he’d recovered from the vampire bite, but -- what they did made it easier for all of us, including Baz himself, to go on hating vampires.

I push my phone back into the front pocket of my hoodie, and then pull the hood up over my ears, before I open my wings and let them carry me up into the air. I circle the grounds a few times at a leisurely pace, enjoying the sun on my wingspan even if the wind thirty feet up is a bit bracing. My endurance is getting better, since the weather has warmed and Penny and I have made it a point to go out regularly a few afternoons a week to parkland where I can exercise enough to build strength in my new muscles. Penny casts **It’s a bird! It’s a plane!** for me, each time, which should make sure that anyone who looks up and sees me in the air will just see whatever makes the most sense for them to see: a seagull, a kite, a hang-glider.

From my vantage point, I see the shuttle bus winding its way back up the country lane about a mile away, back toward the main gates. Circling lower, I can smell coffee and bacon and the unmistakable scent of my favorite cherry scones wafting across the courtyard, so I skid to a landing next to the fountain just as the bus is pulling into the yard, and throw a salute to the startled shuttle bus driver, before settling my wings (burning just a bit from the exertion) and heading into the dining hall for breakfast.

The clock at the front of the hall reads three minutes to seven and it’s still pretty quiet, with maybe half a dozen kids and a couple of teachers seated at the long tables around the hall, talking quietly or reading on their phones.

I pick up a tray and start by piling food onto it -- scones, sausages, pancakes, fruit salad -- then make my way to the large silver urns of coffee and hot water for tea, flanked by carafes of orange, apple, and grapefruit juice, and milk for cereal.

“Simon,” Mitali says in greeting, coming up behind me while I’m filling two mugs with fresh-brewed Yirgacheffe to take back to the Tower along with breakfast. Baz hasn’t texted me yet, but we have the 9 o’clock shuttle to catch for the 10:13 to King’s Cross. Maybe some coffee and scones to go along with his morning blood will help ease him into wakefulness.

“Hey, Mitali,” I say, feeling slightly awkward, suddenly. Not that she hadn’t known I was coming to Watford. I’m just used to hanging out with her as Penny’s mum, not seeing her as Headmistress Bunce.

“Penny said you were staying the night with Baz,” Mitali says, reaching for a mug herself and adding cream and sugar before filling it from the urn. I’m glad she’s focused on getting her coffee, just making distracted small talk, because otherwise I’m sure she’d be able to tell immediately that we’ve been having sex.

It’s not that I think we’d get in trouble or anything -- the Bunces let us share a room when Baz came over, and I know Penny and Micah have -- but it would still be weird, having her know.

“We’re catching the shuttle to the station, later,” I say. “I’m -- he’s going home to see his parents for a few weeks before moving to Fiona’s flat.”

“Mmm, yes, I remember.” Mitali sips her coffee and lets out a happy sigh, like she always does. “Let him know he’s always welcome, won’t you? And remind him to call if he needs any … help. With his family.”

I know she’s told him this herself, probably more than once, but I nod anyway.

She sips her coffee again and wanders back toward the door, probably back to her office and waiting laptop.

In my pocket, my phone vibrates. I set the laden tray down on the nearest empty table before pulling it out to check the messages. From Penny, of course.

 _07:11: !!!_  
_07:12: TMI Simon!! but I am so happy for you guys  
_ _07:12: tell Baz I said so ;-)_


	2. Chapter 2

**BAZ**

I wake up almost without realizing I’ve fallen asleep. My mouth tastes stale and my head throbs slightly, between my temples, like I’ve gone to bed dehydrated. Which I realize is probably the case when I remember last night, and emptying the contents of my stomach several times over into the toilet.

I roll tentatively over onto my back and realize I am alone in the room.

Then there’s a muffled _thump_ at the door and there’s Simon, backing his way through the door, with one of the dining hall trays, laden with food, in his hands.

“Hey, you’re awake!” He says when he turns around to carry the tray over to my desk, shoving the door shut behind him with the toe of his Converse.

“Crowley, Snow,” I grumble at him, mostly because I’m relieved he’s still there and seems happy with me. “What are _you_ doing up at this ungodly hour?” I ask, peering at him. As I ask the question, I vaguely recall him poking me to roll over, hearing him shuffling about the room when the morning sun was just starting to filter in from outside.

“What, you’re the only one who’s allowed to get out of bed first?” He asks, settling the tray on my desk next to the half-empty wine bottle and wilting sandwiches, “I woke up and couldn’t get back to sleep. It’s the new job. I’ve been going in at seven, remember?” He kicks off his trainers and brings the cups of coffee over to the bed, the mattress dipping as he sits down beside me, hip brushing up against mine.

I realize I’m still naked, under the rumpled duvet.

Simon’s eyes keep flickering down to my chest as I push myself up into a sitting position against the head of the bed and take the mug he offers.

“Just from the hot pot in the dining hall,” he says apologetically. “And I didn’t think to take your blood down to...well, get it warmed or something?”

I shrug. “I don’t usually bother, here. I just--take it like medicine. And then brush my teeth.”

“Mmm.” Simon frowns at me, in that way he does when he doesn’t think I’m taking care of myself. It’s a new look he’s developed since Christmas. One I’m pretty sure I’m going to enjoy getting used to. Sometimes, I go out of my way to tell him how careless I’ve been about food or sleep just to see what frowny-face emoji he’ll text to me, or to watch the disapproving wrinkle appear over the arch of his nose.

“Shove off,” I say, taking a gulp of the coffee. He’s doctored it liberally with cream and honey like I like. It helps wash away the lingering taste of bile at the back of my throat.

“Mmm.” Simon sips his own coffee and then leans in with a smile to give me a kiss. “Good morning to you, too, Baz,” he says, against my lips, tasting of coffee and the light summer air outside.

I drop my head forward onto his shoulder and inhale. “You’ve been out by the stables.” I can smell the wet grass and the earth of the yard.

“I went to visit Ebb,” Simon says. I remember that of course he wasn’t here when we held the memorial service, out on the hillside, and when they dedicated the thornapple tree for Ebb, for the sacrifice she made to keep us and Watford safe.

I turn to press a kiss against his cheek, by his ear, feeling the rasp of stubble in the few places where he has enough facial hair to need shaving.

“And I flew, for a bit.” Now that he says it, I can smell the sky lingering about him, identify the sweat of exertion on his skin. I know he’s been practicing, with Penny.  I went with them a couple of times during the Easter break. Simon is beautiful when he flies, and I might possibly have fantasized about what it would be like to wrap myself around him, naked, and let him carry us aloft, the air eddying around us, and kissing him long and slow high up in the sky where no one else would see.

I clear my throat. “I should probably have some blood,” I say. “I--most of it didn’t stay down, last night.” And Simon disentangles himself from me and the bedclothes to go fetch my meal.

“What time is it?” I ask, as he goes over to the fridge to pull out one of the last three jars. Neither of us remembered to set an alarm on one of the phones before we fell asleep the night before.

Simon pulls out his phone to check, “Half seven? We don’t have to rush. And there’s always later trains if--” he trails off into a shrug and hands over the blood, turning to go over to the tray he brought up to snag a scone.

I weigh the familiar weight of the jar in my hand, cold from the fridge, and watch him. In the morning sunlight everything that happened last night feels…sharp and muted at the same time. I look at him standing by my desk, with his sleep-tousled hair and his tail wrapped neatly around his middle, like he tends to do when he wants it out of the way, in his Primark jeans and forest green Watford hoodie. And think about how now I _know_.

Now I know how the soft trail of tawny curls on his belly continues all the way down below the waistband of his jeans, ending in a thicket of hair that protects the soft sweet taste of him between his legs.

Now I know the groove that curves from the jut of his hip down the inside of his thigh, and the little triad of moles scattered on the inside of his right thigh just over where his arteries and veins twist and turn below the surface, carrying blood to and from his heart.

Now I know what he feels like under the palm of my hand, thick with arousal and hot to the touch, but still silk-soft and somehow familiar--not just because I’ve touched myself, there, but because everything about Simon has become familiar to me. Including this. Even before either of us realized.

Now I know what his blood tastes like--hot and sweet and unbearably _Simon_ \--and how much I like it. And also how much I like his other tastes: saliva, and sweat, and the come that spilled over my fingers, and the sea-salt tears I had to thumb away from his eyelashes, after.

Now I know all of these things and, somehow, it’s still all _Simon_. In his ridiculous hoodie and scuffed trainers, standing at the desk stuffing his face with sausages. In this room where we don’t really live any longer but where we grew up together and it’s just--

I look away, and down at my hands full of coffee and blood, trying not to think about how I know placement of the two tiny puncture wounds high on the inside of his thigh.

Before I say anything too terribly maudlin without the cover of darkness I lean over to set the coffee mug on the floor so I can unscrew the lid of the jar and take my blood.

“I told Penny,” Simon says, sitting back down on the bed and handing me a pancake-sausage roll to take the cold blood taste out of my mouth.

“Told Penny?” I’m momentarily at a loss as to what he would have told her about. That I drank his blood? That I lost my shit and ended up locking myself in the bathroom? 

He looks a bit sheepish and ducks his head. “That we…you know. Had sex.”

_Oh._

“She’s says to tell you congratulations,” Simon adds, and there’s a flush of pink across his cheekbones.

“You know, _Snow_ ,” I say, after a beat, “I always _knew_ you’d be that bloke who couldn’t keep his mouth shut when he finally said fuck off to the unicorns.”

He rolls his eyes, but also has the grace to look slightly embarrassed. “You know I won’t--not to anyone but Penny.”

I raise an eyebrow. I feel it important to keep up appearances, even though know I fail at looking _that_ skeptical because I know exactly what he means. If you’d asked me eight months ago whether I’d be comfortable with _Penelope Bunce_ , of all people, knowing a single honest thing about my sex life I would have told you to sod off. But Penny and I have actually had some remarkably frank conversations about sex. I think it only works because she’s been Simon’s friend forever _and_ because the only person whom any of us have ever seen her express actual sexual interest in is that American boyfriend of hers.

“Fuck off,” he says, smiling around the lip of his coffee mug, still blushing. “She’s happy for us.” He tips his head back to drain the rest of his coffee, then leans sideways to drop his mug on the floor.

I’m chewing a mouthful of pancake and sausage when Simon turns back and gets up on his knees to swing a leg over my lap.

I hope he won’t text Penny later to tell her that I squeak when I’m startled.

“Simon, what--?” I lean back to peer up at him. Not that I’m objecting to Simon in my lap (I will never object to that ever again) but he’s awkwardly straddling my crossed knees and has to extend his wings slightly for balance, leaning up and back before settling forward and in.

“It’s just--” he brushes the tips of his fingers down my still-bare arms. “It’s just, I thought--before we go shower.” I shiver at the _we_. I could get used to showering with Simon.

“I mean,” he says, smirking, “what if we had the bad luck to run into a rogue unicorn on the way to the way to the train? Don’t want to take any stupid chances when it comes to your virginity.”

I glare at him narrowly, even while settling my hands on his hips and thinking how decadent it feels to have him fully clothed against my naked skin. “Just how long did it take you to come up with that line?” 

“Yeah,” he says, “I was working on it for most of the morning while flying circuits ‘round the grounds. You know how shit I am at _words_.”

“Wanker,” I respond, fondly, even while shifting to unfold my knees beneath his thighs and letting his weight atop me carry my body back against the pillows.

The contrast between my skin and Simon’s bulk is delicious. I’m slightly cold from the draft coming in from the window we left open in the washroom, from recent hyposanguination, and from drinking a half pint of cold blood. Simon is still warm from exercise and coffee, but with a halo of early morning dew and chill morning air lingering on his skin.

I shiver, again, for reasons that have very little to do with physical temperature.

Maybe the blood hasn’t really had time to kick in yet, or the caffeine either, or maybe I’m just … _done_ pushing back against the overwhelming force that is _Simon choosing me_. Whatever it is, this time feels…different from the other times, including last night. I’m not thinking so much. I’m reacting. I’m doing what I’ve always wanted to let myself do, but have never quite dared: letting Simon have his way with me.

Simon kneels over me, with my wrists held loose under his palms, a grip that lets me know I could get away if I wanted to...but _goddess_ I don’t want to. And the way he _hmms_ against my cheek tells me he notices the hitch in my breath, and maybe the way my pulse is beating frantically against the pads of his thumbs.

“Simon--” I breathe, half a request and half just stating the bloody obvious: that he’s here. That he’s captured me, cornered me here in our room in the only way I’ve ever wanted him to.

“Yeah--” he breathes back, between kisses, “yeah, I know,” and above us he opens his wings to let the morning sun filter through.

Wings moving gently above us, like a monarch butterfly at rest, Simon works his way with agonizing care down my body, mouth and hands and tail all working together to touch me in places I’ve always wanted him and places I never knew I wanted him. By the time he settles between my thighs I’m feeling so dazed with _Simon_ that I’m pantingly slow to realize this has been his destination all along, and by then I’m so wrapped up in the heat and scent and weight of him that all I can do is push gently up into his mouth and hands, fingers clutched into the duvet, while he noses down the side of my dick and presses his lips and tongue and just a hint of teeth into all the same soft, warm places I fit myself into the night before.

“Simon, you don’t--”

“ _MmmMm_ ,” he contradicts with another kiss, lips brushing the side of my cock in a way that makes me dig my fingers into the duvet and bite back an embarrassing _keen_ that nearly escaped off the edge of my tongue.  

“Can’t be too trustful of unicorns. Devious creatures.” He nips at the tender place right above my balls and-- _Crowley_ \--the sharpness of it is the only thing that stops me from coming under his mouth. “Don’t want them to eat you on a technicality. No way to keep you safe except making sure you come for me at least once before we leave.”   
  
He’s teasing. But I can hear the breathlessness in his voice, too, and can’t help imagining how he probably smells _all over_ of me, right now, of the musk and slick I’m starting to leak, and I’m shaking up into the _thereness_ of him, laughter that comes out more like a gasp as he presses his teeth and lips into the soft tissue and muscle of my thigh and _bites_ : a clarifying, bruising pain that washes up and over the pleasure that’s building deep underneath it.

“There,” Simon pants, breathlessly smug. “ _There_. Now you can’t say we aren’t even,” and he’s clambering back up the bed to lean in and kiss my lips, pressing my own flavors and scents against my lips, and nose, until all I can smell is _us-together_ , trailing roses and cedarwood, bergamot and tears.

I’ve stopped shivering, reached the still intensity of muscle memory I know means I’m nearly there, and I start to say it: “I’m--I’m--”

 “Hey,” Simon says, and all I can think is how _tender_ he sounds, and how appallingly close we came to never having this at all, “Hey, I’ve got--I’ve got you, hey--here--“ and he’s slid his hand between us, pressing a hot, damp face into the hollow of my neck, and he’s working me, clumsily, touching a little more lightly than I usually like...but I’m so close and it’s _Simon_ and my last thought before the orgasm crests and pulls me under is, _Crowley, I never even got his hoodie off._

_I’ve only ever had my own heartbeat to listen to, after_ , is what I think when I come back down to the murmur of Simon’s lips against my temple, the eddying air as he extends and folds his left wing over us both as a makeshift sheet.

“You’ll get cold,” he mumbles, drowsily, tucking his head in against mine on the jumbled-up pillows.

“ _Hmmma,_ ” I manage, considering the logistics of getting my left hand--currently wedged between us--down Simon’s pants. The effort seems…complex, though highly rewarding. I wriggle my fingers experimentally, to see if I can turn my wrist in such a way as to--

Simon laughs, pressing a kiss against my chin, “It’s okay, Baz, I think--I think, well, I _know_ you don’t have to--to worry about that.” He turns his face into the crook of my neck.

It takes my brain a few slow molasses moments of post-orgasmic thought before I realize what he’s trying to say.

“Bloody hell, Simon, I _knew_ you should have let me get your pants off.”

“ _Mmm_ ,” he rejoins, happily. “ ‘S okay. I’ll just steal yours. We can…use these... ‘gainst unicorns. Diversion.” He pats my messy belly in exaggerated reassurance, and now that I’m paying attention I can feel the way his own limbs, too, are loosely uncoordinated.

“Okay,” I say. Because you never _do_ know what you’ll run into on the way to the train home from Watford. And then I lift myself up just enough to extract the duvet from under my right hip and pull it back across us both.

If we miss the 10:13 train, I think as Simon’s breathing sinks into its familiar pattern of sleep, there’s always the later one. And the one after that. Or we can call Penny and bribe her (with research assistance at the British Library) to come and pick us up with Costa coffees at the Watford gates.

In the meantime, there’s nowhere I’d rather be than spending my last morning in Mummer’s Tower naked in my boyfriend’s arms.

**Author's Note:**

> Title from [the hymn "Morning Has Broken" originally written by Eleanor Farjeon (1931)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morning_Has_Broken) and famously recorded by Cat Stevens.


End file.
